News
Saxophonist, composer and producer Jerzy Mączyński fuses utopian electronics and organic improvisation on sci-fi jazz odyssey, DO 555PS.
Conceived as a sonic manifesto for an imagined planet – a tabula rasa for humanity to start afresh, live in harmony with nature and build a more idyllic society – DO 555PS is Polish saxophonist, producer and composer Jerzy Mączyński’s most ambitious project to date.
Building on his 2023 collaboration with Jamal Moss aka Hieroglyphic Being, DO 555PS is Mączyński’s first self-produced album – a tour de force of spacious, galactic sound design that leans into drone, minimalism and the rich history of sci-fi soundtracks for a 10-track suite of astral proportions.
Crafted from sound bank from samples of sopranino and tenor saxophone which he calls the “pelican system digital orchestra”, after his band Jerry & The Pelican System, the layered compositions tweak the reedy textures of Mączyński’s acoustic instruments into uncanny forms that seem to expand and contract simultaneously across time and space.
The album opens with the stratospheric ‘Requiem for the EARTH’S nature’, a slab of reverb-heavy outer-space ambience, throbbing synths and insistent kicks – a eulogy for the apocalypse, imagined in sound.
Launched into Mączyński’s universe, DO 555PS unfolds across the brooding fourth world explorations of ‘Nomore.’, the synthetic redemption of ‘Light between us’, and densely fine grain ‘A dry rocky place of hope covered by sonic lava’ – an exercise in audio world-building that surges, swells and shudders a vision of the new planet into being.
From the pulsating, sparse phrasing of ‘Amaze Myself’ – an invitation for the listener to abandon their egos – to the nebulous interzone of ‘Listen to your ghosts’, which sounds like a lost cut from Tarkovsky’s Solaris, DO 555PS is an immersive piece of sonic cinema and a paean to lost futures, best experienced as an unbroken whole.
Set to be released on Eivind Vullum’s Vibrasjon label in Norway, DO 555PS follows the 2021 release of Jerry & The Pelican System’s SARIANI – featuring tracks composed by Mączyński, produced together with Waclaw Zimpel and subsequently performed solo by Mączyński – and 2023’s TUNE IN, made under Mączyński and Hieroglyphic Being’s Universal Harmonies & Frequencies moniker.
Described by The Quietus as one of the most interesting records of the year (“as bold as it is massive”), TUNE IN laid the foundations for Mączyński to strike out alone on DO 555PS, inspired by Moss’s skewed production and arrangements to striking and unique effect.
Inspired in equal parts by Polish soundtrack master Krzysztof Komeda, jazz musician Tomasz Stanko and the contemporary electronic music scenes in Berlin and Scandinavia, Mączyński’s sound is both maximalist and restrained, sensitive to detail and atmosphere, defying categorisation and swirling in an orbit of its own making.
Mixed by Ben Pest and mastered by Helmut Erler, Jerzy Mączyński’s DO 555PS is released on LP via Vibrasjon in March 2025.
text by Anton Spice